Chapter Text
Chapter Two – A Maiden at Ashford
For a little while, Sansa only walked. It seemed safer than thinking.
The slope fell away from the altar into the teeming sprawl of the tourney. Pavilions sprouted like bright mushrooms across the meadow, banners snapping in the breeze. Paths trampled into the grass wound between cookfires and carts, through clusters of armorers’ tents and picket-lines where horses tossed their heads and stamped.
Sansa picked her way along the edge of it all, keeping close to the low rise that cradled the makeshift altar. Her singed hem whispered against her ankles. Every now and then, a stray gust lifted the fine blue silk and showed the blackened threads beneath.
No one stopped her. That unnerved her more than if they had.
Men and women passed within arm’s reach—smallfolk in worn wool and patched cloaks, squires in livery, merchants with bells on their reins. They glanced at her and away again, taking in the soot on her gown and the looseness of her hair and filing her under some category she could not name.
A lady fallen on hard times, perhaps. A noblewoman whose servants had deserted her in the press. Or a pilgrim fresh from some dramatic bout of piety.
She kept her hands folded, chin high. It was easier to wear a mask than admit she had no idea what she was doing here, or where and when here precisely was, beyond the single, heavy word: Ashford.
If I keep walking, I will wake up, she thought. I will turn a corner, and the corridor to Maegor’s Holdfast will be there. Or I will hear Cersei’s voice. Or Joffrey’s.
The thought made her stomach clench. She did not want to go back. She wanted this bright, impossible day to be real precisely because it could not be.
And there was another thing. Dreams did not have this many smells.
The air was full of them: roasting meat and onion from food stalls, horse and leather and oiled mail, the salt of sweat, the sweetness of trampled grass. The heavy scent of the Blackwater was gone, replaced by some smaller stream’s fresh, wet smell. Smoke rose from cookfires in ordinary gray curls, not the sickly green tongues of wildfire.
She passed a group of smallfolk clustered around a barrel where a boy dipped cups of watered ale.
“Did you hear?” one woman was saying, voice pitched to carry. “Old Mira swears by all Seven she saw a lady step straight out of the Warrior’s flames up at the shrine.”
“She was drunk on septon’s wine,” another scoffed. “No one walks out of fire, Lysa. Not unless the Lord of Light’s taken to visiting Ashford, and I’ll thank him kindly to stay in the Free Cities.”
“Mira doesn’t drink,” the first insisted. “Not since her Tobo took the pledge. She says the lady’s hair blazed like copper in the sun and her dress was blue as a summer sky, and there wasn’t a mark on her skin, save a smudge of soot on her cheek.”
Sansa touched her own cheek before she could stop herself, fingers coming away gray.
“If the gods are sending fiery maidens, it’s not for the likes of us,” a man muttered around the rim of his cup. “More’s the pity.”
Laughter broke around the barrel. It washed over Sansa without touching her.
Maiden of fire, she thought. The words sat in her chest like a swallowed stone.
In the version of the song she knew, the phrase came later, in the third verse. He loved a maid of burning light, she had just sung. Ashford. A prince. A maiden. Fire.
Ridiculous. She quickened her steps.
The ground leveled at the base of the slope, the crowd thickening. A line of boys ran past her, shrieking with laughter, wooden swords clacking as they sparred. A washerwoman in a stained apron scolded them, shaking a sodden shift at their retreating backs. From the direction of the lists, the crowd roared again—a swelling cheer that made the banners ripple as if in response.
Sansa flinched.
For a moment, the sound was not cheers but screams, and the banners were not apples and roses but the stags of Lord Stannis snapping above burning ships.
She forced herself to breathe. In, out. The buzz of Ashford pressed around her, bright and alive.
This is not Blackwater, she told herself. There are no ships. No one is drowning. No one is pouring hot tar on people from the walls.
Not yet, some darker part of her whispered. Not here. But these people will suffer, too. The songs never say so, but they always do.
She did not know how long she walked before someone finally barred her way.
“You there. Girl.”
The voice was a man’s, roughened by years of shouting commands. Sansa started and turned.
A guard stood before her, helm under his arm, sweat darkening the collar of his leather. His mail was good but not fine; a man-at-arms, not a lord. His gaze swept over her in a practiced way, taking in the singed gown, the hair, the lack of escort.
“You’re no camp rat.” He frowned. “Where’s your lord, I said? Or your lady? You’re not meant to wander the fringe alone. There are horses and carts through here all hours, you want to be trampled?”
Sansa’s heart thudded. That, at least, was the concern of a decent man. For a breath, it almost eased her.
“I… I was at the shrine,” she said. Truth, of a sort. “I must have lost my way.”
“Up on the rise?” His eyes narrowed. “You’ve soot all over you. You one of the ones who set fire to that poor Warrior’s backside?”
She flinched as he stepped closer, only a little, but his eyes narrowed, and he stopped and hooked his thumb over his belt.
“No,” she said quickly. “There was a fire, but I didn’t… I was only praying.”
“And now you’re wandering.” He huffed. “Seven spare me religious folk. Come on, then. They told us to bring any strange birds to the princes and you’re the strangest I’ve seen today.”
Panic flickered in her chest. Plural? “The princes?”
“Aye. Day’s full of stories about fiery maidens and omens and suchlike.” He jerked his chin toward the royal box and the thickest cluster of dragon banners. “Prince Maekar sent for a report. You’ll do as well as any.”
A dream, Sansa thought wildly. This must be a dream. She was going to walk into a dragon prince’s presence in a dress that smelled of smoke, with ash in her hair, and he would see straight through her, and before he could drag the truth from her, she would wake back in the Red Keep…
But the guard’s hand closing around her elbow was solid. His grip was firm but not cruel as he steered her through the throng.
They wove between tents, past a blacksmith’s awning where sparks flew as a boy pumped the bellows. The nearer they drew to the center, the finer the pavilions became—larger, with bright pennons snapping from their peaks, servants bustling in and out. Sansa caught glimpses of embroidered dragons, suns and spears, stags and cranes.
Her skin prickled.
She remembered sitting at Maester Luwin’s table, chin in her hands, half listening as he traced Targaryen lines of succession. She had cared more about the sound of their names than the order of their reigns then—Aegon the Conqueror, Jaehaerys the Wise, Baelor the Blessed. Her brothers liked war stories, or any story that included something heroic.
When Baelor Breakspear, Prince of Dragonstone and Hand of the King, was killed at Ashford Meadow, his death changed the line of succession and set all the other tragedies in motion.
Now she walked toward that name with soot on her face.
The guard drew her up before a long, low pavilion of dark red canvas. Dragons curled along its panels, picked out not in ostentatious gold thread but in subtler blacks and bronzes. A cluster of men in mail stood before it, speaking in low voices. The guard saluted one of them, a shorter, thickset man with a scar running from ear to jaw.
“Brought you one from the shrine, ser,” the guard said. “Found her wandering by the horse lines. Says she was praying when the fire started.”
The scarred man turned his gaze on Sansa. It was not unkind, but it was sharp, like a smith’s chisel.
“Is that so?” he asked.
“I was at the altar,” she said. The word sept felt wrong here—this was no carved marble dome, just a high spot with clay gods. “I don’t know how it began.”
“Mm.” He glanced at her singed hem. “And you are?”
She hesitated.
Names had weight. In King’s Landing, hers had become the chain keeping her prisoner in a pretty cage. Here, so far south from her home in so many ways, in this impossible place, it might be her only claim to any kind of protection.
“I am Sansa Stark,” she said at last, lifting her chin a fraction. “Of Winterfell. Of the North.”
The men exchanged looks.
“Of Winterfell,” the scarred man echoed. “We’ve no word of Lord Stark sending northern ladies to be at Ashford.”
Her stomach twisted. Of course they didn’t. The Lord Stark they meant was some forebear whose name she had never bothered to learn in her lessons. Eddard Stark, her father, would not be born for almost a century yet. So wouldn’t she, in truth. Everyone she loved belonged to a future that had not yet happened.
“I was traveling south with my family,” she said carefully. “We were separated.”
Not a lie, exactly. Once, she had ridden south with her father and sister, full of hope.
The man’s mouth twitched, as if he heard more in her voice than she intended. He scratched his jaw where the scar puckered.
“Well, my lady of Winterfell-who-is-not-expected,” he said, “you have the misfortune of arriving on a day when every old woman in camp is seeing omens in the smoke. The princes would hear of you. You’d best speak for yourself.”
He turned, pushing aside the pavilion flap.
Inside, it was cooler. The scent of canvas, leather, and oiled steel wrapped around her. The light was gold and filtered, shafts of sun sneaking in through slit windows. A long table stood in the center, maps and parchments scattered across it like fallen leaves.
Two men stood over them.
Sansa knew which one was him before she saw his face.
The nearer man had his back to her, lean and broad-shouldered in a plain black surcoat with the intricate silver pin of the King’s Hand going from his breast and over his shoulder, shaped like a dragon’s claw. His hair was cropped short, dark as a raven’s wing, and a closely kept beard framed the line of his jaw. Silver threaded through it at the temples and chin, catching the light when he moved his head.
He straightened at the guard’s murmur, turning, and Sansa’s breath caught.
He was not beautiful in the shallow, perfect way Joffrey or Ser Loras had been. His nose had been broken once and set a fraction crooked. Faint lines bracketed his mouth and eyes. He looked, she thought, like a man who had spent more time in armor than in silks.
But there was a steadiness in his gaze that caught and held her attention. A quiet weight. His eyes were warm; one brown, almost hazel, and the other the famous Targaryen purple. When they settled on her, they did not linger over her body the way so many had in King’s Landing; they kept to her face and seemed to see her.
“Your Grace,” the scarred man said. “Found this lady wandering below the shrine. Calls herself Sansa Stark of Winterfell. Claims she was at the altar when the fire took hold.”
Sansa saw the moment the name registered. His brows dipped, just slightly.
“Stark,” he repeated. His voice was low, with the soft trace of King’s Landing in it. “Of the North.”
Curtsying, she nodded, throat tight. “Yes, Your Grace.”
He studied her for a moment longer, then glanced past her to the man at the other side of the table.
That one was slightly thicker, paler, his hair and beard a bright Targaryen blond. The resemblance between them, despite their different coloring, was unmistakable. Brothers, she knew, though this one’s features were sharper, his expression more impatient.
“You see?” the fair-haired man said, lips thinning. “First a burnt idol, now stray ladies in singed silk. I told you the septon was being lax.”
“Or perhaps the Seven are paying more attention than we give them credit for, Maekar,” the dark-haired prince said mildly.
Sansa’s pulse lurched as his identity was confirmed, and she tried to recall all she could. Prince Maekar Targaryen. Fourth son of King Daeron the Good. Later King Maekar the First. Father of Daeron the Drunkard, Aerion Brightflame, Aemon of the Night’s Watch, Aegon the Unlikely.
She swallowed, dizzy. It was either happening or it was a particularly vivid and detailed dream.
“I have given the Mother her due for my sons twice over,” Maekar was saying, scowling. “She need not set my brother’s camp on fire to remind me of her presence.”
“No one is suggesting she did,” the Hand of the King replied. “Only that we listen when people say they have seen something strange.”
He turned his attention back to Sansa.
“Forgive my brother,” he said. “He does not enjoy interruptions.”
Maekar snorted. “I do not enjoy foolishness.” His eyes flicked over Sansa, taking in the burned dress, the ash in her hair and on her face. “Where is your escort, girl? What house truly claims you?”
“Prince Maekar,” said His Grace, a note of quiet reproof under the title.
Sansa forced herself to breathe. It was easier to meet Maekar’s scowl than the other man’s steady gaze. The blond prince reminded her of Sandor Clegane, a little: big and bristling, all sharp edges covering something more complicated.
“My name is Sansa Stark,” she said. “I was traveling south with my family. We were… parted on the road.”
“There are no Starks expected at Ashford.” Maekar’s jaw worked. “Father would have had word. There are no Starks south of the Neck.”
His brother lifted a hand. “If the North wished to send a single daughter on pilgrimage incognito, they might have reason to be discreet,” he said. “We are not so fragile that one stray lady will topple the kingdom, brother.”
His tone was dry enough to make Maekar huff, but there was affection under it.
The Lord Hand then stepped closer to Sansa, stopping at a courteous distance.
“You are far from home, Lady Sansa,” he said. “I am Baelor Targaryen, Prince of Dragonstone, and Hand of the King. You are under the king’s peace here, and mine. Do not be afraid to speak freely.”
Up close, she could see the way the silver threaded through the dark beard at his chin. His surcoat was plain but well-cut, the dragon on his chest embroidered small and neat rather than in gaudy splendor. A sword hung at his hip, its hilt worn smooth in places.
He looked every inch the prince she had built in her mind when she sang the song to herself in the Red Keep: not perfect, but good.
A man who died for his goodness here. Heat rose behind her eyes. For a moment, she was afraid she would disgrace herself and cry in front of him.
“My prince,” she managed instead, and dipped into a curtsy. Her burned hem dragged against the canvas floor. “I thank you for your protection.”
“Tell me what you remember of the fire,” Baelor said gently. “Begin at the altar.”
She could not tell him that the altar she remembered best tonight was not the clay gods on the hill but the carved faces in the Red Keep, their stone eyes watching as the wildfire flared green.
“I was praying,” she said. “To the Mother. To the Father. To the Warrior. There was smoke behind the statues. Before I could fetch help, it caught… and… went up in… a wall.”
“And you?” Maekar asked. “You walked out of it untouched, if the stories are to be believed.”
Sansa’s skin crawled. On the one hand, it was better than being snatched by gold cloaks and stripped for a whipping. On the other, being a living omen seemed no safer.
“The fire was very fast,” she said carefully. “I fell. I don’t remember… everything. Only heat. And then I woke up.”
“At the very foot of the burning effigy,” Maekar muttered. “With half the old women in camp swearing they saw a blue-clad ghost step from the flames.”
“It’s only singed, the effigy.” Baelor rubbed a thumb along the edge of the table, thinking. “Old women see many things in the smoke,” he continued, looking at her. “But it is true the timing is odd. The septon says he did not leave enough candles burning to set the clay alight. And clay, to my experience, doesn’t burn.”
“I did not set it,” Sansa said. She heard the urgency in her own voice and tried to soften it. “I swear it, Your Grace. I would never profane a holy place.”
Baelor’s gaze met hers again. Whatever he saw there seemed to satisfy him as his expression eased.
“I believe you,” he said. “And even if you had, it would be a matter for the septon and his gods, not a crown’s inquiry.”
Maekar snorted under his breath, but he did not argue. “He would make it your problem if he could, since you’re here.”
“In any case,” Baelor went on, “you cannot be left to wander the fields alone. You are plainly of gentle birth, and plainly alone. Until we learn more, you will be my guest. We will lodge you with the ladies who attend my mother’s household as best we can in a tourney camp. My men will see you safe.”
It felt as though someone had removed a band of iron from around her ribs. Sansa had not realized how tightly she had been holding herself, waiting for a shout of “spy” or “witch.”
“You are too kind, Your Grace,” she said. “I do not wish to be any trouble.”
Baelor’s mouth curved, a flicker of dry humor entering his eyes. “Lady Stark, the trouble has already arrived, and you are the least of it. You may as well have a bed while we sort it out.”
It was such a simple kindness that something in her chest twisted.
“If the North is missing a daughter,” Maekar said gruffly, “they will send for her. Until then, you’d best keep your head down. We have enough dragon’s blood drawing eyes without mysterious maidens out of fire stirring the pot.”
He flapped a hand toward her hair. “And tie that up. You’ll have every hedge knight in the place tripping over his own feet. As if they never saw a pretty girl.”
Sansa almost laughed. Almost. The sound came out closer to a breath escaping her lungs. She folded her hands to hide their tremor. “Yes, Prince Maekar.”
“Ser Bryen will see you to the women’s tents,” Baelor said. “Food, water, whatever’s needed. We will speak again when you have rested.”
Rest. As if she could. She hadn’t properly slept for years, but Sansa dipped another curtsy and let the scarred knight—Ser Bryen, apparently—lead her back out into the bright afternoon.
The light seemed even harsher after the cool canvas shade. She squinted, following Ser Bryen along a row of tents marked with the small, discreet banners of ladies’ households: a seven-pointed star, a crowned pigeon, a spray of roses. Women sat on stools outside, embroidering or watching the passing spectacle. They eyed Sansa’s gown and singeing with frank curiosity.
Ser Bryen handed her over to a middle-aged woman with iron-gray hair and a no-nonsense expression.
“This is Lady Sansa Stark of the North,” he said. “His Grace has taken her under his protection. See she has water and something fit to wear that won’t fall to ash at the first spark.”
The woman—Olenna, she introduced herself, though not, obviously, of House Tyrell—clucked sympathetically over Sansa’s dress and hustled her into a smaller inner tent.
“Lucky for you, His Lordship has a soft streak,” she muttered as she poured water into a basin. “Most men would say ‘send her back where she came from’ and leave it at that. Arms up, my lady, let’s see what can be salvaged.”
As she tugged at hooks and laces, Sansa stared at the canvas wall, at the faint silhouettes of pavilions and people beyond. Her body moved through the familiar motions of being undressed and redressed by a stranger; her mind floated elsewhere.
Maekar. Baelor. The king called Daeron.
She remembered another line from her lessons: Maekar’s eldest son, another Daeron, a prince who drank himself into an early grave. Aerion, who thought himself a dragon and died for it. Aemon, who became a maester at the Wall. Aegon, “the Unlikely,” who was never meant to be king at all.
She knew too much and too little. Names and endings, but not the days between.
If this is real, she thought, then every smiling squire out there is walking toward a fate she half remembered from a book.
Olenna’s fingers were brisk but not unkind as she sponged soot from Sansa’s skin and wrestled her hair back into some semblance of order.
“You were at the shrine, they say?” the woman asked, more casually than her curiosity warranted. “Stepping out of the fire like some hero from a tale?”
Sansa’s shoulders tensed. “I stepped out of smoke and tripped on my skirt,” she said. “It was hardly heroic.”
“Old Mira’s a gossip, is what she is,” Olenna sniffed, though there was a glint in her eye. “Still. Folks like a story. Makes them feel the gods are watching, if someone’s walking out of fires and talking to princes.”
“Let them find a different story to like,” Sansa murmured.
But when Olenna produced a spare dress—a simpler green wool, cut a little oddly to Sansa’s eye but serviceable—and Sansa stepped out again into the path between the ladies’ tents, she could feel eyes on her.
“That’s her,” someone whispered. “The one Prince Baelor took into his protection. The one from the fire.”
“Thought she’d be taller,” another voice muttered.
“She’s pretty enough. Like a weirwood leaf someone painted eyes on.”
Sansa’s cheeks heated. She kept her gaze down, hands folded just so, every line of her body arranged into poise.
Maiden of fire.
If they put that into a song, she thought, it will end badly. Because the prince in that song dies.
She found herself humming under her breath again as the evening deepened, the words of the ballad threading through her thoughts whether she wanted them or not.
A prince of ash and ember,
A maid of flame and snow…
In her mind’s eye, the scene sharpened: the prince at Ashford, helm gleaming, the maiden watching from the stands, her hair catching the light. Fire somewhere—on a standard, in a brazier’s glow.
The singers in her time had never agreed on the details. Some made the maiden a Dornish girl with sunburned cheeks. Some gave her Valyrian silver hair. Some said she was no more than a symbol and there was no proof the prince in the song even spoke to any particular maiden at Ashford, as dutiful as he had been.
None of them had imagined she might be a Stark from a century ahead who had knelt in a burning sept and begged the gods for a different story.
What if it is you? whispered that inconvenient inner voice. What if you are the maiden of fire, and his death—or survival—is connected to you?
Sansa pressed her lips together, swallowing hard.
She thought of Baelor’s face as he had said, You are under the king’s peace here, and mine. Of Maekar’s scowl, half worry, half irritation. Of the names of sons and grandsons lined up in books in her memory.
“I will not let you,” she had whispered at the altar. She had meant the gods. Fate. The pattern of tragedy repeating itself over and over again when good men died and cruel men lived.
Now she realized she might also have meant herself. If she truly was part of the story that killed him, then she would have to unmake it. She just didn’t know how, yet.
Assuming, of course, that she did not wake in her bed in Maegor’s Holdfast at any moment, with Cersei’s maid yanking back the curtains and telling her it was time to watch another man die.
Until she did, there was Ashford, and princes, and a tale that had not yet turned into history.
Sansa squared her shoulders, feeling the weight of all those watching eyes like a cloak.
She had walked out of fire once already. She could walk into a song and change its verses.
***
The canvas whispered as it settled, muting the bright spill of afternoon back to a warmer, dimmer gold, and Baelor realized he was still watching the place where she had been.
For a moment, it was as if the air she had displaced hadn’t quite settled yet—he still saw her there again in that light: copper hair dull with ash, face streaked with soot, blue silk scorched at the hem—and her spine straight as any queen’s, hands folded so carefully he knew she was keeping them from shaking.
Something in him had stirred at the sight. Not the hot, foolish rush that seized boys at their first glimpse of a pretty face; he was long past that. This was older, deeper. A tightening under the breastbone, an awareness. The sudden, unshakable conviction that here was someone in need of shelter.
Maekar snorted. It was not a subtle sound. “Have you taken leave of your senses?” he demanded.
Baelor glanced at his brother. Maekar had squared his shoulders as if he meant to stand between Baelor and a charging bull. His jaw worked, beard bristling, pale brows drawn low.
“If I have, it is not on account of one frightened girl,” Baelor said mildly. “There are worse follies in this camp than giving a lost lady a bed.”
“She is no business of ours.” Maekar jabbed a finger toward the tent flap where Ser Bryen had led her out. “There are Starks enough in the world without one appearing out of nowhere and landing in my brother’s pavilion. You heard the guards—half the old women on the field think she walked out of the Warrior’s burning statue.”
“Old women think a great many things,” Baelor shrugged. “It does not make them all true.”
“Doesn’t make them all false, either,” Maekar muttered.
He meant it as a jibe, but Baelor heard the worry under the words. With Daeron’s dreams, Maekar had always been more wary of omens than he cared to admit. He would stand with a mace in his hand against ten men without blinking, yet let a raven tap at a window three times, and he’d scowl at the sky for half the day.
Baelor rubbed his thumb along the edge of the table where the lady had stood. Stark. Of all the houses, it was a wolf that had come to his door.
He had not lied to her. The septon swore he had left no candles near enough to set the clay effigy alight, and clay did not burn in any case. Yet the Warrior’s image had blackened and cracked as if it had been held over a forge, and in the smoke, the smallfolk claimed they had seen a maiden step whole from the flames.
But Maekar was right. It was not only one old woman, but several people from different parts of the camp who had faced the altar at the right time and shared exactly the same tale. It had been quick, they had reported; one could blink and miss the whole “miracle.”
Baelor did not know what to make of that.
He was not a man given to superstition. The kingdom had Maekar enough for that. But Baelor was a man of faith. He had seen too many battlefields not to be. There were moments in war—the sudden wind that turned arrows aside, the loosened girth that slipped at just the right instant—that made a man pause and wonder whose hand was on the scales.
If the Seven had sent him a sign today, they had certainly done it in the strangest of shapes.
“She is plainly highborn,” Baelor murmured. “Plainly alone. We cannot leave her wandering the horse lines while every drunk sells a different story about her for the price of a cup.”
“You could have lodged her anywhere,” Maekar shot back. “With the Tyrell women. With the Redwyne girls. But no, you say, ‘My mother’s household will take her.’” He mimicked Baelor’s tone poorly. “You may as well have dropped a cat into a coop and told the hens to make friends. Mother will want to know why you’ve taken a stray into her tent.”
“Our mother has taken in stranger birds than this.” Baelor’s mouth quirked despite himself. “You forget how many years she has been married to a dragon.”
Maekar snorted, but the edge of his ire dulled. “All the same, you’ll have to explain it to her, not I. You foisted the girl on her ladies. You can tell Mother why.”
“That was always my intent.” Baelor straightened. “I’ll speak to her before the evening meal.”
He could feel Maekar’s gaze on him, weighing, measuring, so he turned to face him.
“You believe her,” his brother said at last. It was not quite a question.
Baelor thought of the way she had lifted her chin when she gave her name, as if daring them to gainsay it. The way her hands had trembled, and she had hidden them in her skirts. The way her eyes had widened when he told her she was under the king’s peace, and his. Like a rope had loosened around her chest.
“I believe she is afraid,” he said. “I believe she is trying very hard not to be.”
“That is not the same as believing she walked out of fire untouched.”
“No,” Baelor agreed. “It is not.”
He could not say he believed that part. Not yet. But he could not quite bring himself to dismiss it either. The gods sent their messengers in odd shapes. Why not this one?
Maekar huffed again and reached for his helm. “Mother will want to know whether the girl is a fool, a liar, or an omen,” he said. “And whether anyone needs to be hung for letting the Warrior’s arse catch fire. I’ll send word you’re coming.”
“I am the Hand,” Baelor said dryly. “I think I can present myself at my mother’s tent without an escort.”
His brother gave him a look that said, just as plainly, And yet you did not think you could let the girl walk there alone.
Baelor said nothing to that, only raised his brow. Maekar shook his head, a sigh half muffled in his beard, and stomped out.
When the pavilion flaps had stilled, Baelor closed his eyes for a moment and summoned the image of Lady Sansa again. Not as the old women would tell it, wreathed in holy fire, but as she had stood here in crumpled silk with ash on her cheek and soot at her cuffs, insisting she had not lit the flames.
There had been something in her voice when she spoke of the altar. Not guile; he knew the sound of that well enough. Something like grief. Something like guilt she did not own.
He rubbed his thumb harder along the table’s edge until the wood warmed under his skin.
“I believe you,” he told her image. He meant it.
Whether the gods had sent her or not, she was his responsibility now. He had said the words, took her under his protection. The moment they left his mouth, they might as well have been written in his own blood.
Baelor straightened, settled his surcoat, and went to find his mother before her servants brought the news.
The queen’s pavilion was set a little apart from the crush, its red-and-gold canvas staked on a slight rise to catch any stray breeze. Guards in the king’s colors stood easy watch, but they saluted him as he approached and did not impede him.
Inside, the air was warmer. Tapestries lined the canvas walls—Martell suns and spears twined with three-headed dragons—muting the sounds of the camp. His mother sat on a low chair near the center, a scroll unfurled in her hands, dark hair threaded with silver wound in coils about her head. Two ladies sewed at a side table; another, older woman with iron-gray hair—Olenna, one of her long-serving attendants—stood by the washing stand, drying her hands.
His brother had beaten him there. Naturally.
“Baelor,” his mother said, looking up. “Maekar told me I should expect you—with a story.”
“Did he say which story?” Baelor asked, bowing his head for her kiss. “There are so many in camp today.”
“He mentioned fire, an effigy, and an uninvited Stark girl.” Her lips curved faintly against his brow. “Also, that you have thrust said girl upon my poor, overworked ladies, so I should be sure to scold you properly.”
“I would never doubt Maekar to carry the important details,” Baelor said, leveling a stare at his brother, who shrugged in answer.
Olenna made a snorting sound that she hastily turned into a cough. His mother’s eyes danced.
“Well?” she prompted. “Have you taken to collecting northern strays now, my son?”
Baelor considered how to begin. “A girl was found below the shrine,” he said. “Soot-stained. Alone. Calling herself Sansa Stark of Winterfell. The septon swears the fire at the Warrior’s feet was no work of his. The smallfolk are already calling her a maiden of fire.”
His mother’s brows rose. “And you?”
“I am less quick to see miracles in every puff of smoke,” he said. “But she is gentle-born, and plainly unused to sleeping in ditches. I judged it better to place her under your aegis than leave her to the mercy of a tourney camp.”
“That part, at least, I approve,” the queen said. “Olenna?”
The older woman wiped her hands one last time and came forward. “Your Grace.”
“Can you share with us what you think of the northern lady?”
“Yes, Your Grace.” Olenna pursed her lips. “Pretty as a painted leaf, that one. But she flinches like a beaten hound when you move too fast.”
“Beaten?” his mother repeated softly.
A tightness pinched behind Baelor’s ribs. He’d noticed how she had, when Maekar moved abruptly. Most men flinched when his brother showed his temper, though.
“She… she has marks. Old ones, white and roped, across her back. Newer ones, too. I did not pry, but scars do not lie.” She glanced at Baelor and then away with the tact of long service. “Whoever had the raising of her was not gentle.”
Heat prickled along Baelor’s neck that had nothing to do with the tent’s warmth. Maekar swore under his breath.
“No lord who calls himself Stark would allow such a thing,” Maekar said. “Not of what I have heard of the North.”
“Then perhaps no Lord Stark knows where she is,” Baelor said quietly. “Or what has been done to her.”
His mother’s eyes darkened. “And now she finds herself at a tourney, the object of curiosity.”
“Yes.” Baelor forced his hands to unclench at his sides. “Lady Sansa is under my protection. That should stay some tongues. But not all.”
His mother studied him for a long moment. She had always been able to see more of him than he preferred. He held her gaze calmly.
“You feel for her,” she said. Not a question, either.
“I feel for anyone cast among strangers with a back like that,” he said. “But this is more than simple pity. We can be certain of several things. The timing is odd. A fire where there should be none. A northern girl with no escort, bearing scars that speak of long hurt. The old women see omens in it. I see… a pattern I do not yet understand.”
“And perhaps,” his mother said gently, “a pretty face.”
He huffed out a breath, and only his good manners stopped him from rolling his eyes at that particular tone. “I am not blind, Mother. She is striking. But I have lived at court long enough to know beauty by itself is no miracle.”
“No,” she agreed. “But it can be the color the gods choose to paint their signs with.”
He shook his head, but his mouth curved despite himself. “You have been listening to Father’s septons too long.”
“I have been listening to my son,” she said. “You speak more softly when you speak of her. You do not do that for every frightened girl you meet.”
Maekar grumbled, “He does not speak softly of anyone,” which only made their mother’s smile deepen.
“In any case,” she went on, “you have presented me with a guest. I will not send her back out to be pawed over by gods know who. You will bring her to supper, Baelor, and you will present her to me properly. If you mean to use your name as her shield, I would see the measure of her with my own eyes.”
“That was my thought as well,” he said, inclining his head.
“And you, Maekar,” she added, “will remember that glowering at the girl like a hanging judge will not ease whatever burdens she already carries.”
Maekar made a face that might have been assent. Baelor almost smiled when his brother grumbled, “As you command, Mother.”
Baelor went to fetch Lady Sansa as the sun slid lower, setting the tops of the pavilions aflame with copper light.
The ladies’ tents were quieter now. Embroidery hoops and gossip alike had been laid aside in favor of washing and changing for the evening meal. When Baelor ducked beneath the flap of the one Olenna indicated, conversation hiccuped and stilled.
Sansa stood near the washbasin, the last red of daylight catching in her hair and turning it to burnished metal. Olenna had found her a plain green gown that did her no great favors, but she wore it with a certain unconscious grace that made the wool look finer than silk.
For a moment, she looked almost as she had in his pavilion—hands folded, shoulders drawn tight—but when she saw him, some line in her eased. Not entirely. Just enough for him to see the difference.
“Lady Sansa,” he said, bowing slightly. “If you are ready, my mother will be pleased to meet you.”
She dipped into a curtsy. “Your Grace. I am at your service.”
Courteously, he offered his arm. She hesitated only a heartbeat before taking it.
Her hand was light on his sleeve. He could have closed his fingers over it without effort; he did not. He contented himself with feeling the careful weight of her and the way it shifted as she walked beside him.
Outside, the evening breeze had picked up, tugging at banners and carrying the scents of meat and spilled ale. The tourney’s daylight roar had dulled to a more distant hum of voices. Here and there, campfires sent up sparks like brief, bright stars.
“Have you eaten since we parted?” he asked as they walked. It was not what he meant to say, but the question came easiest.
“A little,” she said. “Your lady Olenna was very kind.”
“She has been with my mother since before I was born,” Baelor said. “She frightens half the court and spoils the other half. You will be safe in her keeping.”
Something flickered across Sansa’s face at the word safe. Skepticism, perhaps. Or simple unfamiliarity. He tucked that observation away with the others.
They reached his mother’s pavilion. Inside, the long table had been laid with what passed for finery in a field—polished trenchers, bright cloth, candles in plain iron holders. His mother’s brows rose—both of them at once—as they entered.
“Mother,” Baelor said. “May I present Lady Sansa Stark of Winterfell. Lady Sansa, may I present my mother, the queen.”
Sansa sank low, every line of her curtsy precise. “Your Grace.”
“Rise, child,” the queen said. “We do not stand on ceremony quite so rigidly in a tent as in the throne room. Come, sit by me. Baelor may sit on your other side, and between us we shall keep you from being trampled by my sons’ appetites.”
Baelor heard Maekar snort from their mother’s other side. He ignored it and guided Sansa to the indicated seat.
At first, the talk was the usual things: the progress of the day’s lists, the quality of the knights’ arms, the likelihood of rain. Baelor found himself asking after the North’s winters, its roads, its harvests—safe topics, the sort he would use with any visiting bannerman.
Sansa answered politely, but her gaze grew genuinely curious when the queen mentioned the spiced lamb they had managed to wring from the royal cooks.
“You have Dornish cooks at court?” Sansa asked.
“My mother would revolt if we did not,” Baelor said before his mother could answer, and was rewarded with the first quick flash of amusement he had seen in her eyes. “You will find their hand in half the dishes tonight.”
She tilted her head. “Then I shall have to judge for myself whether Dornish or northern stews make the better use of lamb.”
“Not to be contradicting a lady,” he said, apologetic. “But ours, of course.”
“Not to be contradicting His Grace,” she replied gravely, equally apologetic. “But of course not.”
His mother laughed, warm and delighted. “Be careful, son. You may have met your match.”
Before Baelor knew it, they had slipped from stews to sweetmeats, from Dornish peppers to northern berries, from the merits of river fish over sea fish to the scandalous things Dorne did with oranges and wine. The camp’s noise faded to a murmur at the edges of his hearing. He listened to the music of her voice instead.
She spoke more freely when the subject was food and kitchens. He learned, in quick, bright glimpses, of a father who had sat at the high table with his children, of a mother who had insisted her daughters know the difference between a well-baked loaf and a burnt one, of a home where the hearth fire had been something other than a thing to fear.
He did not press when her words faltered and went around certain names. It was enough that she was talking at all.
By the time the trenchers had been cleared and the candles burned low, they had moved on to tourney finery. Sansa had a wicked eye for the more ridiculous displays—ornaments too wide to fit through the tent flap, cloaks weighed down with so many glass beads they dragged behind their wearers.
She described, rather vividly and in great detail, a knight with his helm adorned with large feathers, hiding a smile behind her cup. “I feared it would catch the wind and lift him straight off his horse.”
Baelor pictured it—some anonymous lord being carried aloft by his own folly—and laughed aloud. The sound felt rusty in his throat. He could not recall the last time he had laughed so freely in a tourney camp. Or anywhere else.
Next to Sansa, his mother and Maekar exchanged a look. Baelor pretended not to see it.
At last, the queen rose, and the company did likewise. People drifted away in ones and twos, drawn by their own duties and weariness. Baelor found he had lingered without meaning to, not wanting to break the line of talk.
“Thank you for your company, Lady Sansa,” he said when there were at last enough ears gone that his words would not immediately be turned into more camp gossip. “It has been… some time since I spoke of stews and foolish helms instead of border disputes and tax levies.”
Her smile was small but genuine. “Then I am glad to have been of service, Your Grace.”
He wanted, absurdly, to tell her he would see her safe to her tent. But his mother’s eyes were on him, fond and too knowing, and Maekar was already watching like a hawk pretending to be a vulture.
So he limited himself to, “Tomorrow, if you would care to watch the first tilts from the royal box, I will have Ser Bryen find you a place.”
“A place?” she repeated. “In all that crush?”
“Next to mine,” he said before he could reconsider. “If you will endure my company a while longer. I find I would value your opinion on the day’s parade of ridiculous armor.”
Her gaze met his, steady for once. “Then I will try to think of something suitably sharp to say, Your Grace.”
“I do not doubt you will manage,” he said.
As he watched her go, escorted by Olenna and another of the queen’s women, Baelor felt that curious tightening in his chest again. Protective, that was part of it. Intrigued, as well. Naturally.
He was not a man prone to acting rashly and had not been gifted with dragon dreams to guide his decisions. Only his heart and mind, and the morals instilled in him since he could walk. He would watch. He would listen. He would keep his word that she was under his peace.
Tomorrow, he thought, he would see how she laughed in sunlight instead of firelight.
The thought should not have warmed him as much as it did.